Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?

It’s Halloween. Wanna hear something scary? There may be absolutely no
objective standard of moral right and wrong. Good and evil might be entirely
subjective, or merely a social convention, or might even (shudder) be entirely
meaningless and only trick-or-treating in the costume of meaningful concepts.

The status of moral statements, like the idea of free will, is under a
philosophical cloud. Most everyone believes in their heart of hearts that they
have free will, but when you look up close at the philosophical arguments for
and against it, it looks wildly implausible. Similarly, when people argue
about moral values, they almost always are arguing against a background
assumption that some values are just plain right — not conventionally
right, not mere opinions or exhortations, but facts. But this too
looks very implausible on close examination.

In Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? Russ
Shafer-Landau tries to rescue moral objectivism (the idea that certain moral
judgements are indeed objectively correct or incorrect, always and everywhere,
and independently of who utters them or what culture they come from) from a
variety of forms of moral skepticism: nihilism (the idea that moral
judgements are meaningless or refer to nothing at all), moral
relativism (the idea that moral rules are social conventions, like the
rules of grammar or of baseball), and moral subjectivism (the idea
that moral judgements are personal evaluations, like disgust or erotic
attraction, and are only true or false to the extent that they are sincere
or insincere).

Shafer-Landau does this in a peculiar way. Rather than trying to make an
affirmative case for moral objectivism, he instead tries to demolish the case
for the following two propositions:

Some form of moral skepticism has been logically proven.

Any form of moral objectivism can be logically disproven.

This form of logical argument, though, at best only demonstrates that
moral objectivism remains logically possible — it doesn’t actually make a case
for it being true. (Though Shafer-Landau has written a larger book,
Moral Realism: A Defence, that may make this case:
I don’t know.)

So in part one, he describes a number of arguments for moral skepticism and
shows that they each have weaknesses that make them unable to successfully
win the day. And in part two, he looks at various take-downs of moral
objectivism and shows that they don’t succeed in leaving moral objectivism
without a logical escape route.

He does a pretty good job in part two, though I’m not convinced that he has
successfully attacked the best versions of the best of such arguments. Part
one, though, is a complete mess. Many of his arguments there mostly reduce to
“this argument for moral skepticism must be incorrect because it leads to
conclusions that are incompatible with moral objectivism” — in other words,
assuming what he means to prove.

Moral objectivism is reassuring, intuitive, and allows ordinary moral
discourse to have a point. I often find myself wishing it were true. I’m
pretty sure, though, that it’s incorrect, and after reading this careful
defense from a convinced believer, I’m more sure than before.

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